


How You Survived The War

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Adolescent Sexuality, M/M, Robot Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-27
Updated: 2012-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-30 04:55:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Novice Mode is... unsettling, to say the least. Perhaps if it had been installed sooner, before the face had taken on such a strikingly human aspect, you wouldn’t have found yourself in this position. Perhaps if it didn’t look so much like <i>Dirk.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	How You Survived The War

_  
You get back to the wall  
And put your hands up  
It's a holdup  
You give up like every time before  
That is how you survived the war_

_You never multiply, all these divisions  
You give yourself the least of parts  
I put on my green felt hat, pack our provisions  
Playing a merry Prince of Thieves  
_   
[\--The Weepies, ‘ _How You Survived The War_ ’. ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqePMiTAoNE&feature=related)

*

For your thirteenth birthday you receive the unabridged Betty Crocker Book For Boys, a .zipfile of Marvel Comics’ complete archives 1943--2009, and a Designated Strifebot. Unlike the gifts from your friends of the female persuasion, the Strifebot is unfinished, unmistakeably crude: a collection of geometric struts and spite, hellish red-gold eyes and rough-bolted chassis. The fists are approximations wrapped in fingerless leather gloves that do nothing more than emphasis their inhumanity: irony at its presumable finest. 

It has you pinned in a trice. Half a trice. The birthday ribbon-- Dirk’s signature creamsicle orange-- is still affixed to its featureless forehead and you let your head fall back against the floor as you laugh and laugh. The noise echoes ever so slightly less, with someone else-- some _thing_ else, it’s not a person-- in the room. 

“Enough,” you say. “I give, sir.”

It settles back to its mechanical haunches. 

“Good match,” you offer. “I say, you have a hell of a left hook.” You feel dizzy with the unaccustomed pain, and ferociously exhilarated. 

But it doesn’t say anything. When you essay a masculine shoulder punch of camaraderie, it merely pins you again. Unsportsmanlike, some might warrant, but then again it’s hardly a man, sporting or otherwise. For that matter, neither are you. You’re a boy, still-- a hell of a boy, you’d be proud to avow, but you’re not so bathed in hubris that you’d lay claim to the full measure of masculinity at this age, you do know your limits. The robot, though rather larger than you in every direction, is merely a clever use of two hundred pounds of steel and wires.

But you cup the cool side of its face-approximation nonetheless. 

“We shall have such fun,” you promise. 

*

Strider is a gentleman and a true friend, and he sends you upgrades quite regularly. They come in boxes fitted with self-guiding rockets, and likely the transport is more expensive than the parts themselves. You bite your tongue around unmannerly apologies: he is very proud, and to apologize for a task he has assumed for himself would be the height of ingratitude. For the sacred bond of friendship his packages arrive every two or three months, metal and wires and instruction monologues burnt to dvds, and you spend long, happy nights learning the means and methods of robotics under Strider’s calm and dispassionate instruction. Sometimes you leave the dvds running in the daytime, for the satisfaction of hearing him say things you already know. 

“Clockwise,” he’ll say, as you’re spooning syrupy peaches up for your morning repast, “it’s phenomenally fuckin’ important that you don’t install the hadron superconcordinator upside down--”

“Stuff it, you old goat,” you laugh, “as if I’d ever install your hardonwhatsit anywhere but where it bally well needed to go!”

His face is cold behind the screen because he’s not really there, which is a good thing because it is nothing like proper manners to tweak a friend’s nose just for attempting to give his best bro vital information regarding hadrons. 

Sometimes you throw your TV out the window. It’s not very sportsmanlike, but then again the TV is not a man and neither are you. You are a boy and you are very, very, very alone. 

 

*

The bro-bot, as it has come to be termed in the vernacular, is an erratic companion and an impossible challenge. Each update shapes it closer to a precise human facsimile, while at the same time obfuscating its cognitive processes. It’s still fast as fuck and deadly as billy-oh and you get your ass handed to you on a more than frequent basis. You’ve never defeated it. It has begun to leave its charging stations in the evenings, and secrete itself around your island. 

Waiting. Watching. 

“The novice mode,” the orange text reads out from your husktop, “since you were complaining about the difficulty levels inherent in beating the shit out of an animatronic metal deathtrap that contains no fecal mater in the first place, is a new feature I came up with. It should be able to asses your general level of competency and vim down to a precision of 0.0001 percent, and modify its aggression patterns to suit.”

“If I could bally well find it in the first place! I haven’t seen him in a fortnight! Seen it.”

“It seems you’re upset--”

“Oh, do be a love and fuck off, AR,” you sigh. 

“This wasn’t the autoresponder.”

“Like bloody _nora _it wasn’t.” You snap the case closed before he can feed you another heaping spoonful of jellied malarkey. Sporting? Not hardly, and you don’t give a rodent’s posterior. The auto-responder is a machine like your bro-bot, only worse, because Strider makes you talk to it instead for hours and hours of stupid, foolish arguments when you just want to hear another human voice for once and it makes you so dang-blasted angry sometimes. It’s bad enough that he’s all the way across the bally ocean from you and has always laughed off the idea of coming to visit, without going and shoving more insulting technical do-daddery atop the distance. Insult to injury is what you’d call it, if it was actually a thing that was injurious in the first flipping place.__

Instead you are whole, hale, irritated as a hornet’s nest with a rock gone clear through, and ready to get your ass once more handed to you by a tin can with busy fists. 

“What’s wrong with AR?” Roxy asks you on your shoephone. “They’re practic-- practally th’ same person.”

“AR isn’t human.”

“Jus’ a’tween you and me, I don’ think DS is, either.”

You kick your shoephone closed, swap out your compuspecs and head downstairs. Nothing clears the mind like a good split lip.

*

The Novice Mode is... unsettling, to say the least. Perhaps if it had been installed sooner, before the face had taken on such a strikingly human aspect, you wouldn’t have found yourself in this position. Perhaps if it didn’t look so much like _Dirk._ But that ship has most definitely sailed and you are standing upon the docks of confusion, the handkerchief of inappropriate feelings being tearfully waved aloft by the hand of regret and when the bot strokes soft, smooth-brushed fingers along your side an entirely ridiculous noise splinters out between your gritted teeth. 

It can’t talk. The mouth doesn’t open, the nearly-parted lips are perfectly still. The eyes are cold neon orange and he looks so much like Dirk. If a creator’s creation touches you then how close to human contact are you, really? His hands are as warm as a human’s might be. When you squirm against his hold he trails those warm fingers down to your tented trousers, and the smooth blank face tilts enquiringly to one side. 

“I give,” you say. “I-- I please, sir. Enough.”

It goes still. The eyes go dull red. The hands release. 

You draw your legs halfway up to your chest and squirm away. You are gasping, panting, stained with earth, completely fucking discombobulated. 

You grasp your erection through the rough denim of your shorts, and you shake a little, despite yourself. You want-- you want things you don’t have words for, a complicated syrup of fear and need all sloshing about inside your braincase. You want one of Strider’s dvds to explain to you in a cool Texas drawl precisely what is happening to your equipment and how to troubleshoot all the kinks out. 

You want Strider.

“Go away,” you say to the robot. “Just-- go, damn you, get out of here. End session.”

It stands up, a near-silent whir of carefully padded servos. You hear dirt crunch and pumpkin leaves rustle, and then you are, as ever, alone. 

 

*

Things progress as would be likely inferred by the basic principal of temporal causality, one thing turning into another. Days come and go. Movies are sent and watched, comics are sent and read. You track birthdays and spend long nights chatting with your friends. Monsters are hunted and subdued, you start to master the noble art of taxidermy and stain your hands orange for a whole month. The seasons turn. You grow two inches in half a year and notice a handsome fuzz beginning to occupy your broadening jaw. 

You start to have embarrassing dreams about Laura Croft that leave you flushed and panting in the morning, you start to have even more _intensely_ embarrassing dreams that sometimes it isn’t just _women_ that pin you down to the floor of desecrated tombs, that sometimes you look up through cool blue light and it’s orange eyes that gaze back down at you. The hands that hold your wrists are warm-- female, male, steel-jacketed, but always warm. You are not sure which imagining fills you with greater shame, after you have fumbled your way to completion. 

You think of blue skin, orange eyes, Angelina Jolie’s lips quirked in a devil-may-care invitation, and the low soft way Dirk laughs when you make him laugh, as if he’s surprised, every time, and you bite your lip and try not to think of anything at all. 

You feel hollow, afterwards, burnt-through and empty. There is no one to apologize to; you think the nagging sense of unease might be assuaged, if there were. 

The Novice Mode on your robot companion is something that it cycles through randomly, thank the heavens for small mercies, and more than often are you given the drop and beat mercilessly into the floor or the beach or the crunching leafmold of the jungle or some random meadow. You press ice to your bruises, lay neat white stripes of butterfly bandages across your contusions, lay around for days at a time with one ankle or another elevated and watch movies and catch up with your human friends. 

But sometimes it comes to you and waits for you to strike first, and it retreats, retreats, until your fists blaze with pain and your forehead drops to its smooth shoulder and you find yourself in Dirk’s mechanical lap as he strokes warm steel fingers through your hair. 

“This isn’t sporting,” you whisper. “Not one fucking bit.” 

It feels terrifically good just to be held. 

The mouth does not move under your own, but when you press between his legs his hips cant obligingly up. You listen to the crash of waves, or the rustle of the underbrush, or the wind over the grass, or, if you are at home, if you are on your bed, you let one of Dirk’s instructionals play though. 

“If you’re not a complete idiot which, let’s face it, I would not hold even a fraction of the respect I manage to clasp to my heaving bosom on a regular basis under that eventuality, so let’s just assume that you are actually a pretty competent fellow and a rad dude and this sentence has perhaps gotten away from me, anyway, you will know exactly what I mean when I say it is extremely fuckin’ imperative that you wear wielding goggles for this next part.”

“Please,” you murmur. “Oh, please, do go on--” You’re still not sure what you’re asking for. But warm hands dip under your waistband, stroke over your heated flesh. It is an unbearably pleasant sensation. 

You’re not sure why you’re crying. 

*

Dirk isn’t yours-- or, to be more accurate, he is everyone’s, which is very nearly a worse thing. He flirts with everyone: an emotional defense mechanism, according to Roxy, and an intentional abdication from the standards of gentlemanly conduct, according to Jane. According to the Auto Responder it’s because you have a plush rump and shake it like it ain’t no thang. 

He doesn’t really mean it, is what they mean. 

Sometimes, late at night, when you’re bickering about whether or not he could actually construct one of the exosuits from Avatar and if so which of you would win and he jokes about how you’d take any excuse to strip down and get sweaty with him and you just want to scream _Yes, yes, of course I bally well would, you idiot!_ you really wish he would mean it. You wish he would mean anything, for once in his devious, confusing life, you wish he would drop the masks and the double entendres and just tell you that you meant anything to him beyond a rat to run his mazes. A perfectly isolated test subject for all his games. The boy stuck on his island, the ultimate captive audience. And you are, and you do, you run his mazes and argue your way past his infernal auto responder and you stay up talking to him till your head is thick with tiredness and your cock aches inside your trousers and you are so terribly, ungodly, bloody _tired._

Sometimes you hate him for what you let him do to you. 

“Then once we’re all lubed up and I’ve relentlessly pounded your punk ass into the forest floor, we can hit the showers and you can personally show me the power of your pocket pterodactyl, what do you say?”

“Dirk, I-- I say-- that that sounded ever so faintly homosexual,” you say, clutching your audiovisor to the side of your face, feeling the static tingle against your fingers. “Also the p in pterodactyl is silent.”

“Seriously?

“I am entirely serious, bro.”

“Well, shucks, buster, is my face red right now,” he says, that knife-sharp husky chuckle of his washing electric against your ear. “And hey, no homo, bromo, about how passionately our great greasy mechas of mangrit are gonna smash the shit out of each other, I know you’re saving the sanctity of your heteroic tighty-whities for Madam Kittyface Smurfette. Hey, so, what are you wearing right now, is it hot? Are you thinking of me?”

So you demure, and you deflect, and you obfuscate. Dodging Dirk’s counterfeit affections is a duel as sharp and deadly as any you have with his fucking robot, and getting out of a conversation with him with your dignity intact takes on the aching tinge of victory when Jane laughs about the dozen red roses he’s sent to her on National Boss’s day or when Roxy informs you far too graphically about how he’s personally drawn up a spreadsheet for her on feminine marital aids based on durability, efficiency, and horsepower. 

You love your friends. This is the entirety of the problem, you love your friends, each in their own way. Jane is sweet and lovely and Roxy is funny as the dickens and cares more than she’d ever let on about you, and Dirk-- and-- and Dirk is--

“Goodnight, bro,” you say gently. 

“Dream of me,” he says. “Platonicly.”

You break your knuckles open on an unyielding metal chassis, and you wish that you were the only person in the world.

*

You take to chatting with him while the robot fucks you, your vision hazing over till all you can see is a blur of neon orange and then, emboldened, to voice-conference. 

“Judging by your vocal impairment, there’s something like a hundred percent chance you are getting your posterior anatomy totally fuckin’ handed to you by one very handsome DS,” he drawls, all indolence. _Hunnert_ , the way he says it, that ironic good ol’ boy drawl. God, it kills you. 

“I was-- hff-- hoping for a spot of the old assistance, Mister Strider, if you’d, ah, ahhh-- be so kind.” You strain against metal hands. It’s going faster than you thought-- you nearly cry out as it presses in, hits you just right the first try. 

“Do you need me to override your-- huh.” A long, terrible pause. You try not to pant into the receiver. “Says here it’s on Novice Mode.” 

You jolt all over. The robot adds another finger. Your voice is very high as you gasp “Good criminy, you cannn _ngh--_ you can _tell?_ ”

He catches on rather sooner than you’d have liked. 

“Are you-- Jake English, are you _fucking_ my _robot_ right now? Is that what you-- you’re-- what...” He sounds shocked. He sounds _horrified._

Shame sleets through you like an electric current, and grounds itself somewhere in what a naive bystander might optimistically term your heart. 

“Good heavens, Dirk,” you babble, “that would imply you intentionally built me a robot for fucking, which, considering you first sent the infernal contraption to me when I was bloody _thirteen_ \--”

“Okay!” he says hastily. His voice is very high. You are a complete monster. He says, slower, lower, “Okay, Jesus. My mistake.”

“I should bally well say so! The things you dream up, man, sometimes I surely wonder--”

“Motherfuck. Query fuckin’ rescinded, you are now one hundred percent free to untwist your prissy knickers.”

“Alright!”

“Alright. I just... sorry, bro.”

“Yes. Well. Think nothing more of it.”

“But no, seriously, what’s going on with you and him, if it’s within a median average of kosher I will eat every one of my brother’s shitty swords.”

“With me and it,” you say numbly. “It’s not a person.”

“It seems you are being disturbingly cagey.”

“It seems you are being as big a pain in my goddamn bum as your fucking robot!”

“My fucking robot.”

“Oh, can it. I mean-- fuck. You know what I mean!”

He laughs that awful laugh of his that curls underneath your skin like hot smoke, and you shudder all over, helplessly sensitive. The robot spreading you open with warm fingers isn’t a thing that’s stopped happening, and you can hardly stifle your desperate whine as it lights up all your sensitive places. Smooth, relentless metal strokes over what you have come to understand is your prostate and you are lighting up all over like a reaction chamber, ready to blow.

“I’ve got to go,” you say breathlessly. “It’s got the drop on me again, and there’s no time to lose!”

“Think you’re ever going to beat it?” he asks. “Getting trounced by the Novice Setting, seriously, bro.”

“I live in hope,” you assure him. 

You log off, remove your compuspecs, and fold them to one side with trembling, clumsy fingers. 

The robot fits a fourth finger in and _spreads_ them. 

“I love you,” you say despairingly, to no one, and drop your face to your folded arms. 

*

_  
You're not gonna lose this one  
You don't have to cut and run  
I think you can choose to love and what is more  
That is how you survived the war_

_Now in a summer's day, spring a ripened plum  
How will you live under the sun?  
You follow the open road, remembering the guns  
When you get lost under the trees  
_

\--The Weepies, ‘ _How You Survived The War_ ’.


End file.
